How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology

This chapter presents poems from both parts of the Song dynasty, the Northern Song (960–1127) and the Southern Song (1127–1279). The latter period began with the invasion of the Jurchen armies in the 1120s and the consequent withdrawal of the Chinese court to the south and loss of the northern half of the empire to foreign rule. More important to our discussion than the military weakness of the Song, however, is the fact that it was during this period that book printing became widespread in China. Largely for that reason, the amount of writing that survives from the three hundred years of the Song surpasses by far that of any previous dynasty; probably it exceeds the total of all the previous dynasties. The amount of Song dynasty shi poetry is staggeringly large. Some 200,000 poems survive, composed by nearly 10,000 authors. (Quantitatively, at least, shi is the major Song poetic genre, dwarfing in size the younger and less prestigious form of the ci [song lyric].) Very few people can have read all of the shi corpus. The quantity of shi poetry produced is so daunting that it was not until the end of the twentieth century that anyone set about to collect all of it. It required a national effort by a team of dozens of scholars in China and ten years of editorial labor to complete the project: Complete Shi Poetry of the Song (Quan Song shi).¹

The poetry of the preceding great dynastic period, the Tang, is by comparison more manageable and much better known. There has been a Complete Shi Poetry of the Tang (Quan Tang shi) since 1706—that is, for three hundred years—and it is less than one-quarter as voluminous.² The literary history and criticism of Tang poetry is well developed. The serious study of Song poetry as a whole is still in its initial stages.

Nevertheless, it has long been fashionable, ever since the Song itself, for poets and critics to think of the poetry of the Song as stylistically distinct from that of the Tang, and to debate its merits relative to the earlier work. It was both the good fortune and a handicap for Song literati to live after the Tang, with all its achievements in literature. Whatever Song writers produced would inevitably be compared with that from the earlier great age of literary history, often unfavorably. But the high repute of Tang poetry also spurred Song writers to explore new modes of poetic expression, which give Song poetry its own distinctive feel. The innovations are many and go in several directions, some of them seemingly contradictory. They include increased attention to the mundane aspects of daily life, the expectation that poetic diction is not without precedent in earlier verse, the accommodation of a large amount of intellectual thought or content, and a shying away from the overt expression of highly wrought emotion. So distinct did the general tone of Song poetry come to be from its Tang counterpart that, in the later imperial periods, through the Ming and Qing, it became almost a necessity for poets and critics alike to declare a preference for either the Tang or the Song style, although the richness of both periods makes a strict dichotomy suspect, especially since the nature of the Song style is difficult to describe precisely.

I present in this chapter particularly well known Song dynasty poems—ones that are widely anthologized—and comment on aspects of them that are often taken as representative of Song poetic style.

C15.1

Small Plum Tree in a Garden in the Hills, No. 1

When all other flowers have fallen, it alone shows warmth and beauty

2 Taking charge of all romantic feeling in the small garden.

Spare shadows slant across waters that are clear and shallow,

4 Hidden fragrance hangs and drifts under a moon hazy and dim.

The frosty bird wants to alight but steals a glance at it first,

6 If powder-dabbed butterflies knew of it, their hearts would break.

Luckily, chanting poetic lines softly I’m able to befriend it,

8 No need for the singing girl’s clappers or a golden goblet of wine.

[QSS 2:2.1217–1218]

[Tonal pattern I, see p. 171]

This poem, by Lin Bu (967–1028), is a celebration of the quiet beauty of the plum blossom. It belongs to the category of works known as yongwu shi (poems on things), an important subgenre of Chinese poems (thematic table of contents 2.10). Poems on things seek to capture not just the appearance but the inner meaning and essence of their subjects. Many of the favorite subjects of such poems have special significance in Chinese culture, being perceived as embodiments of human attributes or values, or at least as reminders of them. The plum blossom certainly belongs to this group. The plum is the first of the flowering trees to blossom in the early spring. The Chinese spring begins on New Year’s Day, which, by the lunar calendar, may fall anytime between late January and late February. It is not unusual, then, in much of China to have snowfall even after the plum tree has blossomed. Chinese painters are fond of depicting the delicate white of the plum blossom set against snow on the branches of the tree. As one of the “three friends of the cold season” (the other two are bamboo and pine), the plum has long been associated with a kind of delicate beauty that exists in, and despite, the harsh conditions surrounding it. The fact that the plum blossom eschews the showy color and heavy fragrances of other flowering trees has made it particularly beloved of the scholarly class, which sees it as representative of the austerity and self-restraint that are scholarly ideals.

Lin Bu’s poem stresses several characteristics of the blossoms for which they are generally admired. They are singular, appearing at an inhospitable time of year that has laid waste to other floral beauty; moreover, despite the season, their delicate beauty is suggestive of warmth and romance (lines 1–2). Their appearance, however, is not that of luxuriance or intoxicating beauty; the branches are characterized as “spare,” and the aroma the blossoms emit is similarly subtle (lines 3–4). This second couplet is the one that has made the poem famous, evoking as it does the beauty of its subject by deflecting attention to related images (the shadows lying on the surface of clear waters, the aroma drifting in the air, the distant moon in the sky). The blossoms’ feminine allure is such that the bird flying above cannot resist stealing a look at them; and if the butterflies (frequent figures for male lovers who dally with “flowers”) realized that the plum had already blossomed, they would be smitten by its beauty (lines 5–6). Both bird and butterflies, moreover, are marked by a whiteness that matches that of the blossoms. So demure and elegant are the blossoms, in fact, that they represent an entirely different sort of feminine company from that of the professional entertainer, with her music making and wine serving (lines 7–8). We are meant to understand that such pleasures would be lowly in comparison with those brought by viewing the plum blossoms.

Lin Bu is an example of a minor poet who wrote certain poems that had a major impact on literary, and even cultural, history. Because of “Small Plum Tree in a Garden in the Hills, No. 1,” and a handful of other poems that he composed on the same subject, Lin Bu came to be viewed as the patriarch of plum blossom poetry in the Song and later dynasties. Soon, his influence spread beyond literature, as the subject of the plum blossom was taken up by artists and became a staple of the so-called bird-and-flower division of Chinese painting. Plum blossom painting reached its most refined stage with the development of the “ink plum” tradition, in which the real blossom’s avoidance of color was mimicked by the artist’s technique of painting the flower using only black ink—outlining the form with ink on a white background. By the early Southern Song, ink plum painting had turned into something of a cult among literati painters, who competed to produce more and more delicate and ingenious images of the flower’s austere beauty. Ink plum paintings, together with poems about either the natural plant or the artists’ rendering of it, came to be produced by the thousands, for the image had become a symbol of literati ideals, inseparable from the self-image of the men who created it. In this highly anthropomorphized conception, the plum blossom embodied one aspect of the aesthetic and cultural ideals of the period.³

Lin Bu’s poem also brings to mind another innovation of Song literary culture, which was the creation of a new form of poetry criticism, known as “remarks on poetry” (shihua). This was a compilation of short critical observations about poetic lines, evaluating their technique and merits. This form of poetic connoisseurship had its origins in the witty literary conversations among educated persons of the time that eventually were written down. Lin Bu’s poem is discussed in several Song-period remarks on poetry, as critics expressed their appreciation for the second couplet, for example, or debated its merits relative to other couplets on the same subject. Following is an example of one such entry:

When Wang Junqing was in Yangzhou, he met with Sun Chenyuan and Su Zizhan [Su Dongpo]. As Junqing set out wine for the others, he remarked, “‘Spare shadows slant across waters that are clear and shallow, / Hidden fragrance hangs and drifts under a moon hazy and dim.’ This is from Lin Hejing’s [Lin Bu’s] plum blossom poem. Yet these lines might just as well be applied to the flowering apricot, peach, or pear.” Dongpo replied, “Well, yes, they might. But I’m afraid the flowers of those other trees wouldn’t presume to accept such praise.” Everyone present laughed.⁴

C15.2

Lament for My Wife

[QSS 5:14.2837–2838]

Mei Yaochen (1002–1069), the author of this series of three poems, is known for having broadened the subject matter of poetry to include topics that had been viewed as too mundane and “common” to be fit for poetic treatment. He is also known for having cultivated a plain style of language, relatively free from ornament or literary pretension, that compliments the types of subjects he often wrote about.

The poetic series, consisting of at least two poems and sometimes running up to one hundred, is quite common in Chinese verse. Surely one reason poets used it is that most verse forms in Chinese are short (eight lines or fewer) and preclude treating a subject from more than a single perspective. The series allowed the poet to do so. In “Lament for My Wife,” Mei Yaochen took advantage of this feature of the series. Each poem has its own focus. The first presents the essential facts of the tragedy that has befallen him, and his thoughts move from his wife’s untimely death (she was thirty-seven and had been married to him, as he tells us, for seventeen years) to his own mortality. The second poem centers on his loneliness now that she is gone. In fact, Mei Yaochen and his family were traveling by boat from his provincial assignment back to the capital when his wife fell ill and died. One of Mei Yaochen’s sons died shortly thereafter, presumably of the same sickness. In the third poem, the poet reflects on the seeming unfairness of her fate. Having opened with the thought that it is pointless to ask heaven why some die young and others live long, Mei Yaochen proceeds to do just that. Obviously, he is still unreconciled to her death and cannot get over the feeling that it should not have happened. The “treasure” referred to in line 7 is the famous jade disk fashioned by Bian He (ca. sixth century B.C.E.) in ancient times. The jade was so coveted by the king of Qin that he offered fifteen cities for it to the king of the neighboring state of Zhao.

When Mei Yaochen wrote this series of poems on his wife’s death, he was doing something that earlier poets had done. The best-known precedents are those by Pan Yue (247–300), included in the influential sixth-century anthology Wen xuan (Anthology of Refined Literature), and Yuan Zhen (779–831), and it is instructive to read Mei Yaochen’s poems against those earlier works. Both Pan Yue and Yuan Zhen had waited for some time before writing their laments. Pan Yue’s poems are said to have been written a year after the death of his wife; Yuan Zhen’s are thought to have been written several years following his wife’s death. Both earlier series have a degree of formality and distance from the immediate grief of the death that are not found in Mei Yaochen’s poems. The earlier poems are highly literary and polished, mixing historical allusions to renowned women of virtue with references to articles the deceased wife has left behind (for example, her clothes, her sewing needles) and conventional observations about her thrift and contentment with modest circumstances. Mei Yaochen avoids these devices. The language of his poems is disarmingly simple, and many of his statements are surprisingly direct. Many of his lines (3–4 in the third poem) are so straightforward that they would be completely out of place in the earlier works. Finally, Mei Yaochen is not content merely to express sadness at his loss. He presents a portrait of a man who cannot accept or cope with his loss. He is writing very close to the event itself, in the initial stages of trying to get control of his grief.

C15.3

[QSS 14:17.9273; SSSJ 17.905–907]

The author of this poem, Su Shi (1037–1101, also known as Su Dongpo, as we saw earlier), was the greatest literary talent of the Northern Song period. Canliao (1043–ca. 1116) was one of the several Buddhist monks he befriended. Canliao was a poet as well as a monk; indeed, he was known for writing poetry that took leave of the Buddhist style of quietist, meditative verse (thematic table of contents 1.3) and was quite indistinguishable from that the scholar-literati (such as Su Shi) produced (which accounts for what Su Shi writes in lines 5–8). There are different ways of interpreting the personal aspect of what Su Shi is saying in this poem. Oddly enough, one plausible reading is that Su Shi is counseling his friend to be more like a monk when he composes verse, that he need not feel compelled to ape the manner of the poet who is prey to uncontrollable emotions.

The poem opens with a description of monk-related ideals (lines 1–4). His mind should be empty—that is, free from the anxieties that trouble ordinary men. Unlike a wind instrument, a sword tip does not sing out when blown on, nor does a charred stalk of millet continue to produce seed. The monk should be similarly unexpressive. Su Shi then refers to the way that Canliao’s poetry departs from these monkish expectations (lines 5–8). The next section of the poem (lines 9–16) summarizes an essay that Han Yu (788–824), the great Tang writer and statesman, had addressed to a Buddhist monk named Gaoxian (fl. ninth century). Gaoxian was an aspiring calligrapher, but Han Yu held out little hope that he would ever excel at the art. Han Yu’s reasoning was that for a calligrapher to produce remarkable art—especially one who specialized, as Gaoxian did, in the unrestrained draft-script style—his work had to spring from strong emotions. As a monk, Gaoxian worked at emptying himself of attachments and the feelings that they bring, so there was little hope for him as a calligrapher. At the end of his essay, Han Yu moderates his pessimistic prediction somewhat, adding that since Buddhists are known to be good at magic and illusion, Gaoxian may achieve some success despite his inherent disadvantage. This is the statement that Su Shi takes issue with in line 18.

The final section of Su Shi’s poem (lines 17–28) presents a theory of artistic creativity that is an alternative to that which Han Yu had offered. The fact that Han Yu was talking about calligraphy and Su Shi about poetry counts for little. What is at issue is the inspiration and orientation of the artist, whatever artistic form he chooses. Su Shi insists that the Buddhist’s “emptiness and quietude” may also serve artistic ends. He does not rule out the art of powerful emotions; he simply suggests that there is another mode of artistic creativity. He even explains the contribution that emptiness and quietude may make to the artistic temperament. They allow the artist to dispassionately observe the world around him, to “take in” all manner of worldly events, and they permit accurate self-reflection (lines 21–24). The “flavor” that this mental attitude corresponds to is not one of the standard ones (line 26); it is a perfect balance of them all, a “flavorless” flavor that makes all others seem partial and imbalanced. It is precisely the “placid and plain” (danbo, or, more commonly, pingdan) (line 15), superior and “truer” than all the rest, that Han Yu had mistaken for insipidness.

There is a discursive tendency in much of Song poetry that is exemplified in “Seeing Off Canliao.” When critics characterize Song poetry as “intellectual” or “philosophical,” it is this trait they have in mind. There is a surprising amount of argumentation in a poem such as this, as Su Shi summarizes one theory of creativity, only to disagree with it and present another.

Here we have a poem whose very point nicely complements the discursive mode of presentation, an “intellectual” poem that sets the intellect in opposition to the emotions. Song-period aesthetics also generally elevates the quality of the “placid and plain” to be a supreme artistic ideal. In this poem, we see the connection between that quality and intellectuality or thoughtfulness, and we also see it as an alternative to the Tang theory of the art of powerful emotions. The mind that achieves pingdan has an enhanced ability to be reflective because it is not encumbered by, or a slave to, heartfelt subjective feelings. There is a certain detachment to this ideal. Obviously, this cluster of qualities is eminently compatible with Buddhist teachings and surely owes much to their influence.

C15.4

Written on Master Huyin’s Wall, No. 1

The entry beneath thatch-roof eaves, often swept,

is clean and free of moss.

Flowering trees grow neatly in rows,

he planted them with his own hands.

A single river guards the fields,

encircling them in a band of emerald,

Two mountains shove open the doorway,

sending their green inside.

[QSS 10:29.6700; WJGSZBJ 43.822]

[Tonal pattern Ia, see p. 171]

The heptasyllabic line often contains, in effect, two separated but related statements—for example, “The entry beneath [the] thatch-roof eaves [is] often swept,” and “[consequently the ground] is clean [there] and free of moss” (line 1). The line breaks in the translation reflect this two-part structure of the lines in this poem by Wang Anshi (1021–1086).

Master Huyin (literally, South of the Lake) is Yang Defeng (fl. 1080), who was Wang Anshi’s neighbor when he lived in retirement in the mountains outside Jinling (Nanjing). The title, “Written on Master Huyin’s Wall, No. 1,” tells us that this poem was one that the poet inscribed on the wall of his neighbor’s house. To understand this practice, which was not unusual, we must understand that the original inscription would have been valued as much for the author’s calligraphy, seen as the embodiment of his personality and learning, as for the language and meaning of the poem itself. Wang Anshi had served for many years as grand councillor, the highest official in the empire, and had persuaded the emperor to embark on an ambitious and controversial program of reforms. By the time he wrote this poem, he had retired from service and was living more or less in seclusion in the mountains. In all likelihood, Yang Defeng had invited his famous neighbor to compose a poem and inscribe it on his wall. Having been asked, Wang Anshi obliged with a composition that fulfills the social nature of the occasion by complimenting the neighbor on his residence and his way of life.

The opening two lines of the poem emphasize the care that Yang Defeng takes to ensure that his residence is well kept. There is nothing growing where it should not be, and what is growing is not just said to be neatly arranged; it was personally planted by the head of the household. All this speaks to Yang Defeng’s fastidiousness, thrift, and diligence. The opening lines are decorous and polite, but they are not remarkable. If the entire poem was made up of such lines, it would not have attracted critical attention.

The closing two lines are a different matter. They contain pointed borrowings of phrases from Han dynasty historical writings, ingeniously pressed into service in a way that makes literal sense in each line of the poem. The word hutian (line 3) derives in a complex way from language used to describe the establishment of state farms (tuntian) in the western borderlands of the Han empire. The farms were set up in unpopulated areas and run by soldiers who were garrisoned there. Aside from providing food for the troops, the farms effectively created a buffer zone between the agrarian areas of the interior and the lands of the nomadic tribes outside the Chinese border. The language of the Han shu (History of the Han Dynasty) and its Tang commentary is this: “From Dunhuang west to Salt Marsh, way stations were established intermittently. Several hundred ‘field soldiers’ were stationed at Luntai and Quli. Commissioners and commandants were installed to supervise and guard them.”⁵ The commentary, explaining the function of the officials referred to in the closing sentence, says, “They supervised and guarded the cultivation of fields.” It is noteworthy that neither the History of the Han Dynasty passage nor the commentary on it actually uses the phrase hutian (to guard the fields), which occurs in line 3 of the poem. Both sources use the two words but do not join them directly together. Still, the association of the two words in these early texts is felt to be close enough to establish a precedent for their later use, together, as a covert allusion.

The language appropriated in line 4 of the poem is an actual phrase, drawn also from a passage in the History of the Han Dynasty (also found in the parallel chapter in the Shiji [Records of the Grand Scribe], an earlier text).⁶ Some years after Emperor Gaozu (Han Gaozu, r. 206–194 B.C.E.) founded the Han dynasty, one of his generals, Ying Bu (d. 196 B.C.E.), revolted. Gaozu was seriously ill at the time and secluded himself in the palace, attended by only a single eunuch. Gaozu gave orders that no one else be allowed to come to him. Other of his ministers abided by the emperor’s wishes, but the impetuous Fan Kuai (d. 189 B.C.E.) could not tolerate the prospect of being separated from his lord in his time of need. Fan Kuai went up to the room where Gaozu was staying and “burst open the door and went straight in” (pai ta zhi ru). Gaozu’s self-isolation was thus ended, and the emperor quickly recovered.

Allusion is a very common device in Chinese poetry, and it exists in many different types and degrees of reference to the earlier text(s). Sometimes the language of an allusion does not make sense in the line it appears in unless the allusion is recognized and the relevance of the source passage accurately perceived. That is not the case with Wang Anshi’s two allusions. The lines make perfectly good sense even if the reader misses the fact that the two phrases are drawn from earlier texts. The reader will still perceive that the lines present clever matching personifications: the river “guards the fields,” and the two mountains “shove [or burst] open the doorway” to deliver their image of greenery inside. But, of course, the cleverness is enhanced if the allusions are recognized. First, recognition creates a new layer of communication between poet and reader, the latter now understanding that he has espied a tidbit of meaning deliberately secluded in the poetic line; his discovery likewise shows that, in this instance at least, his erudition lives up to the poet’s expectations about his readers. Poet and reader now share a secret about the line that less-informed readers will miss. Second, the phrases that constitute the allusions are seen to be all the more ingenious because the personification aspect of both of them is the poet’s special addition to the earlier phrase. Originally, there was no personification involved. The supervising officers were literally appointed to guard (or oversee) the soldiers in the agricultural colonies. Similarly, Fan Kuai literally burst through the door to get access to his ailing ruler. Wang Anshi’s appropriation of these unremarkable earlier uses and transformation of them by making the grammatical subject of each inanimate—indeed, each a part of the landscape—is an instance of the poetic ideal, first identified in his own age, of “touching iron and transforming it into gold” (diantie chengjin), an ideal inspired by the alchemist’s alleged ability to change ordinary metals into life-sustaining gold.

C15.5

As Dawn Approached on an Autumn Night, I Went Out My Bramble Gate and, Met by Chilly Air, Was Moved to Write This, No. 2

Across ten thousand miles the Yellow River

flows eastward into the sea,

Rising five thousand fathoms Hua Mountain

brushes against the heavens.

Our former dynasty’s subjects have used up their tears

amid barbarian dust,

As southward they look for the imperial army,

another year has passed!

[QSS 39:25.24780; JNSGJZ 25.1774]

[Tonal pattern II, see p. 170]

Lu You (1125–1209), who composed this poem, was but one year old when the Jurchen armies invaded the Song empire from the northeast; sacked the capital, Bianliang (Kaifeng); and captured the reigning emperor (Qinzong, r. 1125–1126) and his father (Huizong, r. 1100–1125) and took them and other members of the imperial family back north as prisoners. This was not a temporary national humiliation. The new emperor retreated to the south of the Yangtze River and eventually established a new capital at Lin’an (present-day Hangzhou). The Southern Song eventually concluded a peace treaty with the invaders that effectively ceded to them the cultural heartland of the Yellow River plain, where the Chinese capitals had always been located. The Southern Song would never regain the north, although during Lu You’s lifetime there were periodic calls from frustrated statesmen to attempt to do just that. The effect of the disaster of 1126 lasted until a greater one struck in the 1270s, when Khublai Khan (d. 1294) sent his armies against the Southern Song. By conquering the dynasty, he completed the Mongol conquest of the great eastern empires (the Western Liao, Xi Xia, and Jin), which his grandfather Genghis (ca. 1167–1227) and his uncle Ögödei (d. 1241) had begun, consolidating control over the entirety (and more) of the lands that had once been under Chinese control. It would be another hundred years before the Chinese rose up and put an end to the Mongol Yuan dynasty. The invasion of 1126 thus marked the start of two and a half centuries of foreign domination of northern China.

When Emperor Gaozong (r. 1127–1163) fled south across the Yangtze in 1127, hundreds of thousands of people—officials, their families, and virtually anyone else who could manage to leave the north—followed suit. But millions of their countrymen were left to face the invaders and their new life under Jurchen rule. (The population of the Song state in 1100 is estimated to have been 100 million, larger than that of all of Europe.) These people were referred to as yimin (people who lived under a former dynasty), the term used in line 3 of Lu You’s poem and, in Chinese historical writing, one designating people whose lives outlast the dynasty they were born under, especially if they remain loyal to the defunct power. Yimin are always viewed as unfortunate; those who happen to find themselves ruled by a foreign conqueror are considered particularly ill-fated.

Lu You’s own politics were distinctly irredentist. He was a lifelong advocate of the reconquest of the north. Two common themes in his enormous collection of poetry (running to some 10,000 pieces) are criticism of the so-called peace policy that prevailed at the Southern Song court and expressions of sympathy for his countrymen of the north. Lu You even went so far as to align himself with the generally disliked grand councillor Han Tuozhou (1151–1207), who sponsored an unsuccessful military campaign against the Jurchens in 1206.

The quatrain “As Dawn Approached on an Autumn Night, No. 2,” was written in 1192, when Lu You was living in retirement in northern Zhejiang but still, clearly, thinking of national politics. The opening words of the title seem to imply that the poet has been awake all night, brooding perhaps on his nation’s plight. The cold air that greets him as he steps outside seems to have a dual effect: it reminds him on that autumn morning that the year is moving toward its end (anticipating the thought in line 4), and it probably serves to set him thinking about his countryman in the north, where the weather is colder still.

The opening two parallel lines present images of the two most noteworthy features of the northern landscape: the Yellow River and Hua Mountain. The latter is the westernmost and culturally most important of China’s five sacred mountains (wuyue).⁷ Overlooking the Yellow River, Hua Mountain is located between the ancient capitals of Luoyang and Chang’an. Owing to the proximity of Hua Mountain to the ancient centers of Chinese civilization, since the earliest times “Hua” has been synonymous with “China” and the “Chinese people,” and even today the syllable is present in the official designation of the country. The irony of the opening lines is that these grand and timeless symbols of the nation, the Yellow River and Hua Mountain, are no longer under Chinese control. The poet can only imagine them; he cannot actually gaze on them. By specifying the length of the river in line 1, the poet indirectly reminds us of the expanse of the Chinese territory now under Jurchen rule. (Although the line actually says “thirty thousand miles,” I have changed it to “ten thousand” in the translation—still hyperbolic but more accurate, given that the Chinese mile was equivalent to roughly one-third the English mile.)

Line 3 identifies the problem that the former people of the Song dynasty now find themselves in, standing “amid barbarian dust,” even though they live along the banks of the Yellow River and in the shadow of Hua Mountain. No tears left, all they can do is look southward for the Chinese army that never comes to liberate them and regain what to Lu You was territory that never should have been formally ceded. The north had already been an alien regime for over sixty years, but Lu You wants us to think that every additional year is still greeted with despair by those who await relief.

The following poem, also by Lu You, presents a completely different mood and theme:

C15.6

An Outing to Villages West of the Mountains

Don’t laugh at the peasant’s winter wine for being murky,

2 In abundant years there are enough chickens and pigs to entertain a guest.

The mountains are chaotic, the river doubles back and forth, as if there’s no way through,

4 Dark green are the willows, bright the blossoms, as one more village comes into view.

Groups of pipe players and drummers follow each other, Spring Festival must be approaching,

6 Simple and rustic are the villagers’ caps and clothes, preserving the flavor of ancient times.

If you allow me to visit when I have leisure, taking advantage of a full moon,

8 I’ll lean on my staff and knock on your door whenever I can.

[QSS 39:1.24272; JNSGJZ 1.102]

[Tonal pattern IIa, see p. 172]

This poem was written in 1167, when Lu You was living at home. He had returned home the year before, having fallen into official disgrace for his support of a military campaign against the northern Jin (acting on the same sentiments as those featured in “As Dawn Approached on an Autumn Night, No. 2”) that ended disastrously for the Song army. It was four years before Lu You was reinstated as an official. As we can tell from the title, the poem was occasioned by a visit Lu You paid early that spring to the mountainous countryside outside his hometown.

Starting with the opening line, the poet takes the side of the rustic peasants he walks among, some of whom evidently invite him into their homes and treat him to food and wine. They take in this stranger, and he, reciprocating, writes about their world with a sympathetic eye (not that they could have read what he wrote). The poet’s attention really is focused on the rural domain he has entered. We note that the two middle couplets wholly concern the landscape he passes through and the peasant ways he finds there. Unlike so much regulated verse of the Tang period, these key couplets of parallel lines do not seek to present a fusion of the poet’s personal life and feelings with the sights before him (thematic table of contents 5.1). Lu You is content to leave himself largely out of the picture he conveys. Consequently, we sense his curiosity about a way of life that has little connection with his own and his reluctance to say anything about himself other than to convey his appreciation of this other way of life.

Lines 2 and 3 are particularly celebrated. There are poetic precedents for such lines—the sudden discovery of a path or an opening when none had seemed possible—but not any that are as ingenious and effectively constructed as Lu You’s, featuring a contrast between massive landscape forms (mountains, river) and tiny dots of colored vegetation that somehow point the traveler to a “way through.” But there is more. I spoke earlier about the “intellectuality” of Song poetry. Many critics through the ages, from Lu You’s own time down to the present, have interpreted these lines abstractly, as evoking a “truth” or “principle” (li) concerning the existence of solutions to seemingly insurmountable difficulties if only we have the persistence to keep looking for an answer. Here we glimpse again the prevalence of the intellectual or even philosophical element embedded in Song poetry. Is it possible that Lu You did not intend such a secondary meaning when he wrote the lines? Yes, it is possible. But the fact remains that he constructed the lines in such a way that they lend themselves to this interpretation, as we see in the remarks of knowledgeable and responsible critics.

One might wonder about the relationship between “An Outing to Villages West of the Mountians” and “As Dawn Approached on an Autumn Night, No. 2.” How could the same writer use the poetic form for such different types of expressions, showing himself to be distraught in the preceding poem over the plight of his nation and caring only, in this poem, for simple rustic life? It is not necessarily that Lu You changed his outlook from one period of his life to another. To answer the question, we must understand the role of poetry in Lu You’s life. During his long span of eighty-four years, Lu You composed nearly 10,000 poems. Poetry was to him a medium for giving shape to innumerable moments of thought and feeling that he experienced, as it was for many Chinese poets. There is hardly anything definitive about any one of these moments or the poem that corresponds to it. It is pointless to try to ascertain which of the two voices we find in these poems is the more genuine or representative of the essential Lu You. Both are equally part of him, as are countless other moods and themes he wrote about. It is only by reading hundreds or (in Lu You’s case) thousands of poems by the same Chinese poet that we slowly develop a sense of what is important to him and how he reacts to events and views his world. That is when we begin to get to know him as a writer and perceive his uniqueness, his distinctive traits. But all the major poets, and Lu You is certainly one of them, will display to us through their collected works a range of emotions and viewpoints. That range may be astonishingly broad and may well encompass apparent contradictions between individual works.

We find a similar focus on rural life in the following poems by Lu You’s contemporary Fan Chengda (1126–1193), but with a different tone:

C15.7

Fields and Gardens Through the Four Seasons,

Random Inspirations: Spring, No. 10

To plant a garden and get it to produce,

the worry matches the labor.

He cannot stand the thought of little boys

and sparrows diminishing it.

He has already stuck thorns in the ground

to protect the bamboo shoots,

Now he spreads out a fish net

to cover the cherry trees.

[QSS 41:27.26002]

[Tonal pattern Ia, see p. 171]

C15.8

Summer, No. 34

In a lotus patch a thousand acres across

she goes boating for fun,

The flowers are so dense she loses her way,

and fails to come home at dusk.

Her family can discern indirectly

where her boat is,

Now and then she paddles anxiously,

small ducks rise up in flight.

[QSS 41:27.26004]

[Tonal pattern IIa, see p. 171]

C15.9

Autumn, No. 44

The clay on the newly made threshing ground

is as flat as a mirror,

Household after household threshes rice plants

taking advantage of the clear frosty weather.

Behind the singing and laughter

faint thunder rumbles,

All night the sounds of the flails

echo until the sky turns light.

[QSS 41:27.26005]

[Tonal pattern IIa, see p. 171]

These three poems are from a set of sixty quatrains that Fan Chengda wrote about rural life outside his hometown in Pingjiang (near present-day Suzhou) that are among his most celebrated works. Fan Chengda is known for his detailed poetic depictions of life in the countryside, which have a focus and flavor all their own. As we see in these poems, he is capable of keeping silent about his own circumstances and emotions as he moves about the countryside. In a preface to the series, he tells us that he wrote it in his later years, when he had recovered enough from a period of illness to be able to visit his secluded dwelling in the countryside and, once there, stroll in the fields. He made poems out of what he saw. Fan Chengda’s farmstead verse thus departs from the tradition of the countless earlier poets—for example, Tao Qian (365?–427)—who withdrew to the countryside to write about themselves in their rustic seclusion (thematic table of contents 2.8).

One immediately notices the acuteness of Fan Chengda’s observation. His poems show considerable knowledge about the actual work of the farmer, agricultural techniques, and peasant lore. They also show an interest in the lives of the peasants, who toiled endlessly in the fields. His portrait of rural life is a remarkably unromanticized one, noticeably less so than Lu You’s in his poem “An Outing to Villages West of the Mountains.” There may be laughter and singing while the families thresh the rice, but the work continues all through the night. The theme of the arduousness of farm life runs throughout the poems. It is exactly because, in “Spring, No. 10,” so much toil has gone into his garden that its owner has no qualms about setting out thorns to greet the bare feet of small children who might be tempted to help themselves to the results of his labor.

Fan Chengda’s refusal to sentimentalize the life of peasants around him shows itself in another conspicuous theme in his poems: the relentless struggle to meet the taxes that the government requires. Here is another poem from the same series that features it:

C15.10

Summer, No. 35

Picking water chestnut is bitter work,

the plow and hoe are useless.

His bloody fingers ooze crimson,

brittle and emaciated as a ghost.

He has no means to purchase land

so plants for now in water.

But recently whatever comes from the lake

is also subject to taxes.

[QSS 41:27.26004]

[Tonal pattern Ia, see p. 171]

Several of the poems in the series depict the tax obligation as the overriding burden in the peasants’ lives. Women stay up all night weaving silk that will be used to help meet the tax obligation (no. 29). The grain that is finally harvested, with exhausting labor, is said to go half to pay outstanding debts and half to pay taxes (no. 41). In another poem, a peasant watches as the pure-white kernels of rice that he has harvested are transferred from his boat to the government granary and is glad to think that at least he has kept some of poorer quality, mixed with husks, to keep his children from going hungry (no. 45). The corruption of local officials is also broached in these poems, reference being made to the widespread practice of vastly undercounting the quantities of grain that the peasants submitted to meet their obligation (no. 45). The series also touches on distinctions of social class. One poem uses the Seventh Night Festival to present a contrast (no. 38). In wealthy households, the festival is marked with much gaiety, as the girls come out at night to beseech the Weaving Maid (zhinü) in the sky for skill in sewing. In the farmhouses, the doors are bolted at dusk—because everyone is too tired to stay up. The girls in those families already know how to sew, the poem observes, and the boys how to herd oxen. They have no time to celebrate the annual romance of the Weaving Maid and her celestial Herd Boy lover.

There is, of course, a long tradition of poetry that describes the hardships of the common people, even those caused by the very officials who are supposed to look after them. In Fan Chengda, we find this poetic mode taken to an unusual degree of specificity about the realities of peasant life that made it so onerous. This is a different manifestation, informed by social class and political consciousness, of the capacity for writing about the domestic and everyday aspects of experience that we glimpsed earlier in Mei Yaochen.

Ronald Egan

NOTES

1. Quan Song shi (Complete Shi Poetry of the Song), 72 vols. (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1991–1998). The compilation runs to 45,698 pages, with, on average, four poems per page.

2. Quan Tang shi (Complete Shi Poetry of the Tang), 25 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1960).

3. The subject has been exhaustively and masterfully written about by Maggie Bickford, Ink Plum: The Making of a Chinese Scholar-Painting Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

4. Wang Zhifang, Wang Zhifang shihua (Poetry Talks of Wang Zhifang), no. 28, in Song shihua quanbian (The Complete Collection of Poetry Talks of the Song Dynasty), ed. Wu Wenzhi (Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1998), 2:1147.

5. Ban Gu, Han shu (History of the Han Dynasty) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962), 96A.3873.

6. Ban Gu, Han shu, 41.2072; Sima Qian, Shiji (Records of the Grand Scribe) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959), 95.2659.

7. Most commentators assume that line 2 refers to Hua Mountain, rather than to any other of the sacred mountains or even, conceivably, all of them together, because of the frequent pairing of the Yellow River and Hua Mountain in Lu You’s poetry, and because the height Lu You gives for the mountain matches that given for Hua Mountain in early writings.